Arvesyndens politiske økonomi: Fra Søren Kierkegaard til Roswitha Scholz

Debt—as it has been frequently noted—seems inextricably tied, semantically as well as historically, to the notion of guilt. Less attention, however, has been paid to the Christian origin of this guilt complex in the doctrine of ‘the original sin’. The present article argues that Kierkegaard’s critique of the doctrine of original sin, formulated on the brink of high capitalism, can be read as a critical reflection on the uses and abuses of the concept of history to suit doctrinaire ends. Kierkegaard’s critique then, its shortcomings notwithstanding, pertains to a wider problematic concerning the ideological instrumentality of historico-philosophical myths of origin. In the history of capitalism, as Marx pointed out, the doctrine of the original sin is transposed from the sphere of religion to that of political economy, where it figures as ‘original accumulation’. Within this critical framework—and drawing on recent Marxist feminist critiques from Silvia Federici and Roswitha Scholz, respectively—the article further pursues to expose and critique the ideological default of the idea of an original accumulation.